Demand Media Acquires Artist Marketplace Society6 For $94 Million

Demand Media just announced that it has acquired Society6, an ecommerce marketplace for artists.

“All an artist needs to do is upload their artwork or design and consumers can customize a wide range or products, from iPhones to T-shirts to home décor accessories,” a Demand Media spokesperson tells WebProNews, describing Society6’s functionality.

The deal is worth about $94 million, with Demand Media paying $75 million in cash and approximately $19 million in common stock.

“Society6 augments and diversifies our content & media platform by adding an innovative e-commerce marketplace with multiple traffic sources and a large community of talented artists. This acquisition will significantly accelerate the scale of our e-commerce business as we continue to expand into new revenue models,” said Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

“We intend to expand Society6 by offering their unique marketplace to our existing media audience of over 100 million unique global visitors per month,” he added. “In addition, we plan to leverage our expertise in managing content creation platforms, our experience in building creator communities, and our significant engineering and product resources to further drive Society6’s scale and growth.”

Society6 co-founder Justin Cooper said, “Our team is excited to join Demand Media because they understand the importance of content creators and will help expand our community of artists and our audience. We are looking forward to benefitting from Demand Media’s expertise to accelerate the success of our marketplace.”

Demand Media says it will use Society6 to grow its content and media platform. The marketplace consists of over 100 million product SKUs and over 300,000 members. It was founded in 2009.